Artist: David Smith

Long considered as the sculptor most closely associated with abstract expressionism, David Smith (1906 – 1965) was in fact a restless polymath for whom sculpture, drawing and painting formed a single creative current—sculpting by day, working on canvas and paper by night. This fall, Hauser & Wirth presents an exhibition devoted entirely to his trailblazing Sprays. A seldom-seen body of work, the Spray paintings both develop from and ultimately invert Smith’s exacting sculptural process: negative space becomes structure, color becomes atmosphere, absence becomes subject. These luminous palimpsests compress the physical world into radiant fields that reveal a painterly sensitivity as rigorous and as radical as the artist’s sculpture.